Arus Balik – Shifting Currents Symposium: Day 2Arus Balik – Shifting Currents Symposium: Day 2

Understanding contemporary architecture and design practices that navigate histories of inequality and violence requires careful reflection, dialogue and action. How can we find the vocabulary, tools and artistic languages to acknowledge these pasts, while expressing the futures we wish to share? The symposium, organised in the light of the wider Arus Balik - Shifting Currents, invites architects, artists, designers, collectives, historians and design researchers to contribute insights, blueprints, vocabularies and tools that might bring us closer to reassessing the futures at stake through an intersection of pasts and lived realities.

In four sessions, spread out over two days, invited panellists will offer their moments of shifting paradigms and currents. At the heart of this symposium is a non-hierarchical and multivocal approach to knowledge, analysing the possibilities of design experimentation when nourished by situated, local perspectives and innovative archival research.

• 09:00 Walk-in
• 09:30 Welcome by Museum Arsitektur Indonesia and look back to Symposium Day 1
• 09:45 – 12:00 Session 3: Debts and Bonds in Design Legacies
• 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
• 13:00 – 15:00 Session 4: The Social Life of Space
• 15:00 – 15:30 Closing remarks by Nieuwe Instituut
• 15:30 – 22:00 GUD Instituut Living Room
• 15:30 – 22:00 Screening Metrics of a Temporary Dwelling by Hannah Dawn Henderson
• 16:00 – 19:00 Zine harvest book making workshop with Cut ‘n Rescue (RSVP here)
• 19:30 – 22:00 Food and music

• Chairs: Setiadi Sopandi and Robin Hartanto Honggare 
• Speakers: Amanda Achmadi, Sandro Armanda, Nashin Mahtani and Mohammad Nanda Widyarta

The construction of buildings and infrastructure in colonial Indonesia was often an extractive enterprise, dominated by Western-trained experts despite its reliance on local resources and technical skills. Roads, railways, bridges, canals, offices, factories, warehouses and research facilities provided the necessary tools to integrate the colony into the global trade network and modern monetary system, while at the same time perpetuating inequality between colonial authorities and local subjects. This fundamental feature of colonialism suggests that Indonesian-Dutch design legacies, which are deeply rooted in postcolonial societies, should be assessed not only for their technical and aesthetic contributions, but also for their social, environmental and financial implications. In this session, we ask: What extractive conditions produced colonial architecture? How have these conditions shaped building practices since Indonesian independence? How can socio-economic and environmental approaches shed light on Indonesian-Dutch design legacies? And given the uneven conditions that define colonial spaces, what debts do ‘we’ owe to the past, present and future?

• Chair: Ayos Purwoaji 
• Speakers: Yasmin Tri Aryani, Paoletta Holst and others

Architecture is the creation and negotiation of space. During and after their creation, buildings and neighbourhoods take on a life of their own. Architectural spaces become implicated in struggles for emancipation, such as the right to housing, or signifiers of a changing local scene, not in the least exacerbated by political processes of space monetisation. The social life of such spaces can be understood as the ways in which people perceive them, interact with them and use them. Over time, colonial-era buildings have been used, appropriated and reused differently - finding new uses beyond their original function. How have residents, locals and stakeholders interacted with colonial buildings from Indonesian independence to the present day, and what does this tell us about the changing meanings attached to former Dutch colonial spaces?

From this September, Nieuwe Instituut, Museum Het Schip and Gudskul present the Arus Balik – Shifting Currents programme. Supported by DutchCulture, the Prince Claus Fund, the Marinus Plantema Foundation, Museum Arsitektur Indonesia, Berlage di Nusantara and others, this initiative aims to bring together architecture and design networks that link the regions and their diasporas, recognising architecture and design as material witnesses to colonial histories and pathways to possible shared presents. How can we rearticulate design legacies between Indonesia and the Netherlands and investigate future pathways?